Friday, March 16, 2012

Mortification and the Catholic Church

The Catholic church teaches about structured self-mortification – not as a masochistic endeavor to snuff out the lower nature, but to assimilate our egocentricity and our physicality to our higher, spiritual nature.

Self-examination and mortification are meant to put innocent physical things (food, sex, warmth, wine, coffee, exercise, health, walks in the woods, movies) in the category of the “things that will be added unto us” if we first seek the “Kingdom of God and His Glory”, rather than being ends in themselves.

Babylon or no Babylon, I think Swedenborg is closer to Catholicism (praise the Lord!) than to sola fide Protestantism.